It really annoys some Spaniards that the British
only remember their victories and conveniently forget their defeats.
Especially if the latter were inflicted by the Spanish. For example,
there was the failed attacks on Cádiz in 1797 and on Ferrol in 1800.
And, before that, the attacks by Drake on La Coruña and on Lisbon in
1589. And then there was the humiliating defeat of the British fleet
at Cartagena de Indias in 1741. Or somewhere like that; I can't
really remember. What really drives all this anger, though, is not
the apparent anti-British sentiment but very real resentment that
Spanish kids aren't taught about these Spanish victories. All of
which, by the way, amounted to beating off attackers, not defeating
them on the open seas. Which is not to diminish them in any real way.
The boys done well. And, in 1589, the British lost the chance to
wrest naval supremacy from the Spanish until much later.
Here's another of those Spanish words which mean
something very different in the female form - pendón. Apart
from meaning banner, this means layabout or
good-for-nothing in the masculine form but - what else? - tart
or slut in the feminine form. Is there no end to these?
In retrospect, it wasn't a great idea to have my
roof tiles replaced during the World Cup but who was to know the
scaffolding was going to block the signal to my dish?
As I was leaving town on Tuesday night at 10 - to
walk home to a non-viewable football match - there was a blackbird
singing its throat out on the roof of the offices of the provincial
administration. Can there be any more pleasant sound of an evening?
By the way, Pontevedra is blessed with the offices
of the national, provincial and municipal administrations, all within
spitting distance of each other on either side of the Alameda. Guess
who the city's main employers are.
Talking of such things . . . The ex-President one
of the Galician provincial administrations is in court on charges of
nepotism and croneyism. Faced with the accusation of putting more
than a hundred of his relatives in administrative positions, he
responded that he'd thought there was nothing wrong with this and
that it was perfectly normal. The chap employed a Personnel Manager,
whose only task, it seems, was to take note of which job was to go to
which of the President's relatives. Something of a cushy number,
then.
Finally . . . Here's one of my favourite
columnists on the Muslims for Peace non-movement:-
Moderate Muslims – it’s time to be
outraged: David Aaronovitch
Why is there no Islamic peace movement? Because
followers are too caught up feeling sorry for themselves as victims.
It is a hard enough thing to run away from home in
Cardiff to become a warrior for the caliphate, it is quite another to
do it from Melbourne. But in Australia too last week there were
stories and photos of local Muslim boys who had somehow managed to
travel half the circumference of the globe to take part in a conflict
their surfing school-mates had probably never even heard of.
Reading about this in an Aussie paper in a coffee
bar in Sydney I found myself wondering how this could have happened.
Or, more precisely, why it doesn’t seem to happen for anyone who
isn’t a Muslim. Coptic Christians from Ethiopia are not to be found
trekking across the intervening desert to take up arms on behalf of
their persecuted Egyptian brothers; 17-year-old Huddersfield
Catholics and west London Greek Orthodox altarboys are not en route
to Ukraine to take part in the struggle for Donetsk. If, God forbid,
there were widespread violence in socialist Venezuela, I would not
expect the Pilger battalion of British teen leftists to turn up,
red-arm-banded, in Caracas. So why, Muslims might ask themselves,
echoing Mario Balotelli, is it always us?
This is an awkward question both to pose and to
answer, partly because there are so many people who are absolutely
and easily convinced that they do know the reason. They assure me on
Twitter most weeks that the problem is Islam as a faith. Uniquely
among religions, they assert, Islam is literal not interpretative,
and that means it is by nature aggressive, violent and
fundamentalist.
I don’t believe this for a second. There is now
and has always been dispute within Islam as to the meaning and
application of texts. It is susceptible to reform and schism just as
Christianity, Judaism and other religions and political credos have
been. Furthermore, as a religion with 1.2 billion adherents, of whom
well over 1.1 billion manage to make it through life without hefting
an AK47, attending a training camp in Waziristan or watching a
judicial amputation, the generalisation doesn’t tell you about how
Islam is actually practised.
And yet the problem remains. In the 1950s and
1960s the insurgencies around the world were ideological or
nationalistic. Whether it was by the Shining Path in Peru, the
Maoists of Nepal or even the fascist bombers of Italian railway
stations, people were being killed by rebels in the name of political
ideas. But although killers such as Anders Breivik and Timothy
McVeigh suggest the persistent potency of certain far-right
ideologies, today’s victims of IEDs, car bombs and mass abductions
are most likely to be killed — according to their killers — in
the name of the Prophet.
There is no non-Muslim equivalent of what, until a
few days ago was Isis but are now the forces of the self-appointed
caliph Ibrahim. There isn’t a Christian Boko Haram. Pakistan is not
convulsed by militant communists, but by its religious extremists in
the local Taliban and other groups, who between them may have killed
50,000 people in the past ten years. There is no country that is not
Muslim that attempts to enforce sanctions for apostasy or has the
death penalty for blasphemy. Vaccinators are not being assassinated
by Jews, nor voters having their fingers chopped off by Baptists.
Again, it’s obvious that most Muslims do none of
these things. They want to eat good food, lead decent, peaceful lives
and watch their children grow up. And, in fact, ordinary Muslims are
by far the biggest casualties of the jihadis and the zealots of
apostasy. Pakistani Shia are massacred by Sunni extremists; Sunni
civilians are snatched by Iraqi Shia death squads; the Syrian civil
war has seen as many as 170,000 deaths in three years. By contrast
the past 25 years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict accounts for
just under 10,000.
What is therefore doubly curious about this is the
lack of a sense of Muslim outrage about what some other Muslims are
doing. Who, for example, protests about the death penalty in many
parts of the United States? Well, people in the United States and
other western countries do. Judicial execution has been abolished in
almost all formerly Christian countries despite its explicit sanction
in the Bible.
Who complains about creationism being taught in
schools? Among others, many Christians do. Is any campaign against
Israeli actions complete without a complement of not-in-my-name Jews?
Hardly, and that’s a healthy thing. By far the most effective
critics of an action or a policy are those on the inside.
Yet I must have missed the sense of Muslim outrage
at, for example, the Sultan of Brunei’s adoption of the most
medieval form of Sharia, or at the persecution of religious
(including Muslim) minorities in ostensibly Muslim countries.
It isn’t that some Muslim organisations aren’t
trying. The two most recent campaigning statements of the Muslim
Council of Britain concern condemnation of jihadi recruitment for
Isis and female genital mutilation. They deserve credit for that.
But it is obvious that this self-policing isn’t
what floats the boat of Muslims politically. There’ll be the
occasional good statement, but if, say, Israel bombs Gaza, then
suddenly social media will fill up with Islamic outrage, careful
commentators will become passionate, marchers will hit the streets.
Why is there no Muslim Peace Movement campaigning for an end to
violence in Muslim countries, where the victims are Muslims and the
perpetrators are Muslims? Where it might make the most difference.
A couple of weeks ago listeners heard a depressing
report from Bradford. Sima Kotecha, the BBC correspondent, was
interviewing young Pakistani-British boys about Iraq. Would they go
and fight for Isis or other groups? “I would go. They’re
brothers,” said one. “You’re going to live as a Muslim, die as
a Muslim, innit?” said another.
There is at work here what can only be called a
victim mentality — paradoxical given the power and size of Islam —
which casts Muslims as being eternally oppressed and eternal victims.
This week the supreme leader of Iran, arguably the
most powerful Muslim religious leader in the world, tweeted his
“analysis of recent events in the region”. Point 1 was: “Main
enemy: security and intelligence services of the West.” Point 2 was
their tactics: “Sowing sectarian conflicts”, launching proxy wars
and “fabricating forged alternatives of Islam”. Neither he nor
any other Muslim had any real responsibility for any of it.
A fantasy of victimhood is difficult enough when
it enchants just a nation. When it enthrals a world religion it is
terrifying.
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